From Politico:
As health reform regulations begin to take shape, Planned Parenthood has begun a quiet campaign to ensure that birth control is counted among the free preventive services that health insurers must cover under the Affordable Care Act.
Beginning Sept. 23, six months after the reform law passed, many health insurance plans will be required to provide free preventive services coverage, with no co-pays or out-of-pocket costs. During the reform debate, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) added an amendment that specified guaranteed “additional preventive care and screenings” specific to women’s health would also receive coverage.
What remains to be determined is what will make the “preventive services” list. …
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Other reproductive health groups are also at work on the issue, looking at whether emergency contraception could find a place under the new regulations. “We’re in a collation, operating on the same tasks within our community,” said Laura MacCleery, director of government relations for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We’re actively pursuing what we think falls within the appropriate boundaries of the coverage of this amendment.”
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“Congressional debate on the need to cover ‘preventive services’ in health care reform centered on services needed to prevent life-threatening diseases like breast cancer, not on a need to prevent the birth of new recipients of health care,” Richard Doerflinger of the[U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops'] Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities e-mailed POLITICO.
Is the Pill preventive, in the sense meant when preventive medicine got debated during ObamaCare? Not at all. Democrats specifically called out early diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes to argue that ObamaCare would be an overall cost saver. A subsequent CBO analysis showed that argument to be a fallacy, but that didn’t stop them from making it repeatedly and consistently during the debate. That never included an explicit argument that lowering the birth rate would be an overall cost-saver, or that it was a legitimate government interest to suppress the birth rate.
